makers of oddments, raiments, and accessories for the discerning individual

Upgrading Celty’s Jar (Durarara!!)

Toadvine writes:
While Taylor did an incredible job with Celty’s head for our original version of Celty’s head in a jar, but I was disappointed with the level of polish and screen accuracy I achieved with the jar in our initial weekend crafting spree. Presented with another opportunity to display the head at an event, I took a few days to upgrade the container.

I began by stripping off the foil tape from the edge of the lid and rebuilding the lid to be more screen accurate. I removed the 1.5″ ridge from the bucket and used half of it to extend the bucket’s original lid. I used Apoxie Sculpt to combine those pieces of plastic with a pot lid, the bottom of a prescription bottle, and a new cabinet handle. A few rounds of sandpaper (from 80 to 400) and a little bit of primer went a long way to making a pile of different things look like a single object.

Meanwhile, I needed a base where I’d previously skipped making one. I cut two differently sized circles from MDF with a scroll saw and then bent & epoxied some sheet styrene around the edge so that while I had a 1″ band of plastic, I only lost 0.5″ of the visible area of the bucket. The larger circle was screwed to the bottom of the smaller one.

I heat-formed another styrene ring for the top of the bucket (0.5″ down to allow for closing the lid) and then epoxied it to the bucket itself. I may have overdone it with the clamps but I wanted as many points of pressure as possible while the epoxy cured.

I used Apoxie Sculpt to tack on four 1.5″ lengths of styrene tubing to the ring and threaded a ring of aluminum armature wire through it. Once I had all four parts (bucket, lid, ring, base) fitting together, I primed them in black and then gave them a base coat of gunmetal gray spray paint. I then assembled them to take a quick look.

Using a dry brush and acrylic model paints, I added silver highlights, bits of rust, and a touch of green grime at appropriate places on the pieces of the jar. After they had dried, I sprayed them with a Krylon satin clear coat. For the first few nerve-wracking minutes, the clear fogged my paint job badly and I was afraid I would have to sand it down and start painting again. Happily the coat became clearer as it dried and after 60 minutes it stabilized at about 99% of its pre-spray clarity while bluring some of my brushstrokes rather nicely. During that hour of drying I peeled off all the masking.

For the bottom of the bucket, I epoxied a circle of cork to the bottom of the base and burned a signature of sorts in with a wood burning needle.

With the new jar done, I threaded the straps onto the ring, put the head back in the jar (stuck to its post with hot glue) and hot glued the straps to the lid for more stability than my previous magnets had provided. The base was epoxied to the bottom of the jar